Quill pig is another name for a porcupine. Porcupines are unattractive and unpopular, but, as animals go, and unlike eagles, elephants, and donkeys, they are reasonably harmless good neighbors that mind their own business. Here's where we can talk about being good neighbors and why it's eternally important.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Good Words, and from a Conservative, No Less (3)

Twelve years ago we had a Republican president and a Republicanj
Congress that did a pretty thorough job of exactly what you say here
you want. Click here to see what else they did.

The weapons your heroes used were so effective against the women who
survived them that the Iraqi minister of health recommended that
people in the affected areas not have children at all because
the rate of birth defects was so high.

I would submit that any reasonable person whose
family or friends were blessed with these children and who connected
Christianity in any way with what happened to them would be well
within his rights to consider Christians bad neighbors and do
everything in his power to get those Christians to convert, leave,
or die.

I remember hearing of no evangelical Christian going to Kuwait in
the name of Jesus before Desert Storm to save the babies from being
thrown out of the incubators. I do know that a Republican
administration told Saddam it was no biggie if he invaded Kuwait to
begin with, and their friends in the arms industry made gigabucks
(not to mention winning a publicity landslide) out of Desert Storm.

I've read the fatwa Osama issued in 1998 declaring jihad against the
US government, not the American people, but I have
never heard of an evangelical Christian going in the name of Jesus
to try to put Ken Sande's principles into practice in conversation
with him.

And, of course, after 9/11, instead of suggesting that Americans
look at the beam in their own eye before taking out the mote in the
Muslim world's eye, Mr. Evangelicalism Himself, Billy Graham, simply
told us to pull together as a nation.

Maybe the reason jihadists don't respond to anything but dominant
force is that that's all they ever get from our side. And no, I
don't think the billions in "humanitarian aid" we've sent there over
the years counts: the purpose of bread and circuses here and abroad
is to keep the slaves from revolting, and everything that didn't go
to bread and circuses over there was taken from the pockets of
middle-class Americans (as was the bread-and-circuses budget) and
put in the pockets of rich, compliant foreigners. The people over
there who aren't in the crony loops hate the US puppets, and ISIS
has a golden opportunity to provide an alternative. (Being a state
-- in fact, as the powers that be ordained of God in much of Syria
and Iraq -- they will fail, but not for lack of opportunity to
punish those who do evil and commend those who do right, as Peter's
epistle has it.)

Conservatives and liberals, among others, know no language but brute
force. It's how you fight prostituion, pornography, homosexuality,
substance abuse, loss of income from unemployment and retirement,
illiteracy, disease, hunger, racism, and just about everything else.
The result has been the bloodiest century in the history of the
world, and the carnage shows no sign of ending. What will it take to
get you to question your presuppositions and consider putting Romans
13 in the context of the Golden Rule and 1 Samuel 8 instead of vice
versa?

The main article in the American Conservative sounds a warning that
patriotic conservatives regard us Christians with suspicion. I don't
know about you, but I think that if Henry Kissinger, Hillary
Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Donald Rumsfeld.
Barack Obama, Janet Yellen, and the rest of the establishment who
walk the corridors of power no matter who's in office had the
opportunity to shut the churches tomorrow, they'd take it. If I were
Satan I would want the evangelical community to forfeit the moral
high ground by going along with their barbarity as long as they
don't close churches. Once no one who would otherwise defend us
wants to have anything to do with us, they'll close the churches and
that will be that.

Well, no it won't. A few weeks ago [the preacher at my church] read from the pulpit
the testimony of a Syrian Christian suffering from the blowback from
the war we started. God will use people like that Syrian Christian to do the work of
evangelizing the nations we passed up the opportunity to do so we
could feed Uncle Sam so we wouldn't have to have testimonies like
his. We will reap what we've sown. "Give and it will be given to
you, pressed down, shaken together, a full measure.

Take another good long look at those pictures. Those may be our
great-grandchildren..